Dog food-are these ingredients necessary?

Above all, buy the food that your dogs do well on. Use your dog's body as a guide not advertising or pet food ratings based upon some website's opinion based upon reading labels.

Crowe wrote:
Been comparing dog foods again as I'm trying to find a less expensive alternative to the Blue Basics we've been using. Blue Basics contains lots of ingredients like blueberries, cranberries, yucca, peas, chicory root, kelp, and a few other things.

In my opinion these are added by pet food companies to lure human customers to buy their food. They are added in well below any therapeutically relevent level just like foods that have added glucosamine.

I have found one study where blueberries were fed at 0% and 2% of the total daily diet for 2 months in two groups of sled dogs. No benifit from the added blueberries was found for sled dogs after streneous exercise. What is the total precentage of blueberries in these pet foods?




Blue Buffalo is run not by a dog person, or a vet, or a feed expert; it is run by an advertising expert.

Started in 2002 and propelled by advertising techniques the elder Bishop honed hawking Kool-Aid, Tang, and later SoBe, a beverage company he co-founded in the 1990s....

He has been caught misleading consumers in the past.

SoBe named products for aspirations—Power, Wisdom, Eros—while stopping just short of specifically telling consumers they’d actually enhance their influence, intelligence, or sex appeal. In February 2000, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent a “warning letter” ordering the company to cease certain misleading health claims. The FDA noted, for example, that dairy-based Lizard Blizzard claimed it was “loaded with nature’s most powerful cold and flu fighters.” That falsely implied that the product was “intended to treat, prevent, cure, or mitigate disease,” the FDA said.

The compnay was then purchased by PepsiCo.

Flush with PepsiCo cash, Bishop and his family were coping with Blue’s canine cancer when they decided to investigate the commercial potential of healthy dog food. Bishop saw parallels to sweetened beverages: high margins and low barriers to entry. “You can get into the market small with contract manufacturers making the stuff,” he says, displaying an easy candor. “Slap on a good label, come up with a slogan, and off you go,” he says. “There were already a lot of smoke and mirrors in how pet food was advertised, and that was the sort of stuff we were good at.”

source: Dog Food Fight! Purina Says Blue Buffalo Is 'Built on Lies'



I know it bothers some, BB does not manufacture it's own food.

Later this year, Blue Buffalo plans to begin operating its first food plant, in Joplin, Mo., practically in Purina’s backyard. Some of Blue Buffalo’s product will still come from contractors.